Gulf of Carpentaria Developmental Fin Fish Trawl Fishery Level 1 Ecological Risk Assessment

Abstract

The Queensland Ecological Risk Assessment Guideline (the Guideline) was released in March 2018 as part of the Queensland Sustainable Fisheries Strategy 2017–2027. This Guideline provides an overview of strategy being employed to develop Ecological Risk Assessments (ERAs) for Queensland’s fisheries. The Guideline describes a four-stage framework consisting of a Scoping Study; a Level 1, whole of fishery qualitative assessment; a Level 2, species-specific semi-quantitative or low-data quantitative assessment and; a Level 3 quantitative assessment (if applicable).
The aim of the Level 1 ERA is to produce a broad risk profile for each fishery using a qualitative ERA method described by Astles et al. (2006). The method considers a range of factors including the current fishing environment (e.g. current catch, effort and licensing trends), limitations of the current management arrangements (e.g. transfer of effort to already saturated markets, substantial increases in fishing mortality for key species, changing target species) and life-history constraints of the species being assessed. In the Gulf of Carpentaria Developmental Fin Fish Trawl Fishery the Level 1 ERA assessed fishing related risks in 20 ecological components including target & byproduct species (incl. six quota categories), bycatch, marine turtles, sea snakes, crocodiles, dugongs, cetaceans, protected teleosts, batoids, sharks, syngnathids, seabirds, terrestrial mammals, marine habitats and ecosystem processes.
The Level 1 ERA identified drivers of risk for target & byproduct species (OS (Gulf) quota category only), bycatch, marine turtles, sea snakes, batoids and marine habitats. The Gulf of Carpentaria Developmental Fin Fish Trawl Fishery will not be progressed to a finer-scale Level 2 ERA as these risks will best be addressed through permit conditions for the fishery.